Berlin - East Germany's last communist leader, Egon Krenz, left prison on bail yesterday to appeal against his manslaughter conviction for the fatal shooting of four people trying to flee over the Berlin Wall in the 1980s, Derek Scally reports.
Today's appeal in the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg is against the 1994 decision by the German courts that as a member of the Politburo, Krenz was responsible even though he had not pulled the trigger in any of the shootings.
He is appealing against the conviction on the grounds that he was acting within the laws of the German Democratic Republic at the time and that the decision contravenes the European Convention on Human Rights.
The court in Strasbourg is Krenz's last court of appeal after Germany's highest appeals court decided not to overturn the decision a year ago today, one day before the 10th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Krenz took over from an ailing Erich Honecker as East German leader and head of the ruling Communist Party in October 1989, a month before the East German borders opened to the West.